Charles Sanders Peirce , the most important and influential of the classical American philosophers, is credited as the inventor of the philosophical school of pragmatism. The scope and significance of his work have had a lasting effect not only in several fields of philosophy but also in mathematics, the history and philosophy of science, and the theory of signs, as well as in literary and cultural studies. Largely obscure until after his death, Peirce's life has long been a subject of (...) interest and dispute. Unfortunately, previous biographies often confuse as much as they clarify crucial matters in Peirce's story. Ketner's new biographical project is remarkable not only for its entertaining aspects but also for its illuminating insights into Peirce's life, his thought, and the intellectual milieu in which he worked. (shrink)

A distinguished panel of essayists address many key issues in Peirce's thought.

"This volume is a scholarly collection of massive biographical detail, much of which is being revealed for the first time." —Isis A selection of Fisch’s most important articles on these topics is presented here in a convenient format, including revisions and updating and a complete bibliography of Fisch’s published writings.

Throughout his literary career Walker Percy read and studied the philosophical thought of Charles Sanders Peirce in an attempt to re-present in language the world as Percy knew it. Beginning in 1984 and ending in 1990, the year of his death, Percy corresponded with Kenneth Laine Ketner about the "semiotic" of Peirce. Their letters - honest, instructive, and often filled with down-home humor - record an epistolary friendship of two men both passionately interested in Peirce's theory of signs. (...) This volume of letters provides a rich philosophical perspective for better understanding the fiction and nonfiction of Walker Percy. (shrink)

Report on Charles Sanders Peirce and his contributions to a newspaper, includes yearly breakdowns of his contributions, analysis of his writings, his contributions to philosophy, and more.

Percy has been studied under several headings: Catholic, Southerner, Existentialist. Two such aspects, however, have been neglected: the strong influence of Charles Sanders Peirce, plus Percy’s deep competence in laboratory science. His typescript essay, “Peirce and Modern Semiotic,” presented here, shows that Percy was well ahead of his contemporaries in understanding the scientific and philosophical importance of Peirce’s Semeiotic, the Theory of Semeioses. Percy particularly pointed to the experiential importance of “taking the other’s meaning.” He regarded that common phenomenon as (...) vital, and genuine—a kind of event that behaviorists such as B. F. Skinner or Charles Morris explained away as nothing but a dynamic dyadic causal process. Percy’s essay definitively blocks those reductions. (shrink)

pt. 1. 1869-1893.--pt. 2. 1894-1900.--pt. 3. 1901-1908.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:186 Reviews 1914: GREY AND PEACE OR WAR Kenneth Blackwell Margaret MacMillan. The War That Ended Peace: the Road to 1914. Toronto: Allen Lane, 2013. Pp. xxxv, 739. isbn: 978 0 670 06404 5. c$38.00 (hb). ith the advent of the centenary of wwi, and of Russsell’s criticisms of Sir Edward Grey in his minutely historical “The Policy of the Entente” (1915; in Papers 13) for Britain’s (...) participation in it, one needs a readable history of the intense diplomatic manoeuvres during the years leading up to the war. MacMillan provides that history, with period illustrations and asides to our day about substituting “prestige” for “honour”, preventive war (a term that isn’t indexed), and even George Kennan’s long telegram. Russell claimed Grey misled Parliament repeatedly about Britain’s commitments (see FO, pp. 501–2). Yet Russell’s 1948 essay “Democracy and Foreign Policy” almost excuses Grey’s covert actions as due to the fear of populist hostility to Germany preventing “the last possibility of general pacification”. It is astonishing how much popular hatred of Germany is revealed in MacMillan’s book. She points out that this was a country “which had been created by war” (p. 294); however, that does not seem special. On page 584 “June 21” must be “July 21”. t... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:186 Reviews 1914: GREY AND PEACE OR WAR Kenneth Blackwell Margaret MacMillan. The War That Ended Peace: the Road to 1914. Toronto: Allen Lane, 2013. Pp. xxxv, 739. isbn: 978 0 670 06404 5. c$38.00 (hb). ith the advent of the centenary of wwi, and of Russsell’s criticisms of Sir Edward Grey in his minutely historical “The Policy of the Entente” (1915; in Papers 13) for Britain’s (...) participation in it, one needs a readable history of the intense diplomatic manoeuvres during the years leading up to the war. MacMillan provides that history, with period illustrations and asides to our day about substituting “prestige” for “honour”, preventive war (a term that isn’t indexed), and even George Kennan’s long telegram. Russell claimed Grey misled Parliament repeatedly about Britain’s commitments (see FO, pp. 501–2). Yet Russell’s 1948 essay “Democracy and Foreign Policy” almost excuses Grey’s covert actions as due to the fear of populist hostility to Germany preventing “the last possibility of general pacification”. It is astonishing how much popular hatred of Germany is revealed in MacMillan’s book. She points out that this was a country “which had been created by war” (p. 294); however, that does not seem special. On page 584 “June 21” must be “July 21”. t... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Reconstructing Pragmatism: Richard Rorty and the Classical Pragmatists by Chris VoparilRichard Kenneth AtkinsChris Voparil. Reconstructing Pragmatism: Richard Rorty and the Classical Pragmatists. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. Pp. xiv + 377. Hardback, $74.00.A house divided cannot stand, or so Jesus tells us. As far as I can ascertain, Jesus was right about many things (his followers perhaps less so). Accordingly, that the house early pragmatists built, with (...) all of its subsequent divisions and internecine controversies, still stands is something of an anomaly. Perhaps it is explained by the fact that pragmatists have also been blessed by peacemakers, among whom Chris Voparil is to be numbered. In this carefully researched and clearly written book, Voparil examines the ties that bind Richard Rorty to his pragmatist predecessors: C. S. Peirce, William James, John Dewey, Josiah Royce, and Jane Addams. The hope animating Voparil's book is that with a closer look at these ties he "can unsettle the current map of opposing pragmatist camps by uncovering previously obscured or overlooked alignments and common aims" (259). He argues that Rorty did not misunderstand his predecessors but "consciously radicalized" (280) their positions.The book is five chapters long, with each of the chapters devoted to Rorty's relationship to one of the five aforementioned classical pragmatists, in that order. There are also substantial introductory and concluding chapters. The more controversy-laden chapters are the first (on Peirce) and third (on Dewey). As Voparil explains in chapter 1, Peirceans are wary of Rorty's apparent antirealism. But to soothe the worries of wary Peirceans, Voparil argues that commitments to realism can be found in Rorty's early and later works and that some of the more outrageous statements from the middle period are exaggerations that are ultimately qualified, if not disavowed. The Peirce scholar may wish that Voparil had done more to distinguish different varieties of realism found in Peirce's writings, as Robert Lane has done in his recent Peirce on Realism and Idealism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), but the crux of Voparil's argument is persuasive enough. Rorty did not deny that there is a world that affects us and that there is such a thing as "getting it right," even if he thought that varieties of representationalism about mental states and the correspondence theory of truth are not topics worthy of further discussion. Voparil does not [End Page 530] cite the footnote, but Rorty states the matter sufficiently clearly when he writes, "I think that [Nelson] Goodman's trope of 'many worlds' is misleading and that we need not go beyond the more straightforward 'many descriptions of the same world' (provided one does not ask 'And what world is that?'). But his point that there is no way to compare descriptions of the world in respect of adequacy seems to me crucial, and in the first two chapters of this book [Ways of Worldmaking] he makes it very vividly" (Consequences of Pragmatism [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982], xlvii). Rorty's point is that talk of "the world" can play no interesting explanatory role in our accounts of truth, representation, and the like just because we cannot now (or at any given future time) claim to have the final vocabulary to talk about the world. There is an interesting parallelism to Peirce's theory of induction here that Voparil does not explore. On Peirce's theory of statistical induction, we cannot claim at any given time that we have ascertained the real frequencies in nature, but we can be assured that in the long run we will eventually approximate them. Similarly, for Rorty, we cannot claim at any given time that we have the final vocabulary for describing the world, but that does not prohibit us from claiming that we can improve our descriptions of the world, where improvement is relative to some purpose. As Rorty concedes, the descriptions of nature that emerge in the modern period are better descriptions than those of the Aristotelian physics, given various purposes that we have (Consequences of Pragmatism, 191).Turning to chapter 3, Rorty's misappropriations and misrepresentations of Dewey's views have peeved Dewey scholars. In particular, Rorty... (shrink)